Tetherd Cow Ahead

Cissy Strutt, ever on the lookout with her Cow Eye (that didn’t sound quite right), sent in this flyer for our mutual hilarity.

Of course, the sentence to which your eyes were surely drawn is ‘I do tarot without all the naff crap‘. Tarot without all the naff crap, is, in this case, just a hot chocolate (as it would also be with all the naff crap). At $15, an expensive hot chocolate to be sure, but when Elle says ‘I’m good’, maybe she’s an ace on the milk steamer.

Still, I kinda empathise with Elle. When I was younger, I too considered a career as a fortune teller, but gave it away because I couldn’t see any future in it.

WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #5

NOTE: I have replaced the images in this post after a legal challenge from Dr Emoto’s office, on the basis of intellectual property violation. You can read about it here. I note that images of Dr Emoto and his water crystals appear widely across the internet on sites that are supportive of his ideas. I leave it to you to make a conclusion about why he objects to them on my site…

This is Dr Masaru Emoto. You might remember that some time back I had cause to mention Dr Emoto in relation to the improbable H²Om ‘vibrationally charged water’, for whom he may or may not have been some kind of spokesman.* I promised in that post that we’d examine him in more detail at a later date, so here we go.

Dr Emoto believes† that human emotions, through speech or thought, effect the behaviour of water, particularly the way water crystallizes.

To put it in the very simplest of terms (and trust me, there’s not a lot more to it than simple terms): if you think bad thoughts at water while it’s freezing it will make ugly crystals, and if you think good thoughts it will make pretty crystals. Does that sound daft? Yeah, well by any sensible yardstick, it pretty much is.

Dr Emoto has also come to the conclusion that even just the words that we use to convey certain emotions and ideas will affect water! He maintains that simply writing words on the containers used to freeze water will influence the kinds of ice crystals it makes. These are similar to some of the examples to be found on the Hado‡ website (a comprehensive archive of Masaru Emoto’s ideas):

Yes, that’s right – just the written words for the French, Japanese and English language expressions for the concept of ‘thank you’ create crystals as expressively different as those in these pictures. Remarkable! And is it just me, or does the French ice crystal look flamboyant and florid, the Japanese one precise and elegant and the English one ugly, coarse and ill-defined – classic, banal racial stereotypes. I bet ‘danke’ would turn out angular and severe, with no sense of humour.

Dr Emoto, by his own admission, is not a scientist. In his ‘experiments’ with water crystallization, he has suggested that photographers use their aesthetic discretion when choosing examples that endorse his ideas. As far as science goes, then, this is something more akin to an art excursion.

What’s wrong with Dr Emoto having a charming little eccentric idea about water caring what we think about it? Well, the problem is that Emoto’s notions have been picked up by just about every lunatic in existence who has some kind of ‘water therapy’ as their cause, and then been advanced by those people as science, either directly, or just by the omission of salient details. If you were unfortunate enough to have endured the inane ‘What the Bleep Do We Know’ you will have seen exactly how Dr Emoto’s ideas are advocated: breathless slack-jawed wonder, without a shred of critical analysis (or even just common sense) in sight. Merchandizers like H²Om, who are selling nothing more than purified water, are quick to flaunt Emoto’s convictions (if it suits them) and homeopaths from here to Asheville NC, who are now clutching at anything that remotely even looks like a straw, are hitching their implausible beliefs to Emoto’s fantastical star.

And, as eccentric and, well, Japanese, as Dr Emoto comes across, it’s hard not to like him. Reading through his website you get the idea that he’s just a nutty old geezer who’s had way more attention than he should have, for an idea that is childlike and appealing in a very undemanding way. Hado is a cute, wide-eyed, uncomplicated view of the way things work – the ‘Hello Kitty’ of science.

Sadly, credulous people with little grasp of what science is actually about find the allure of Dr Emoto’s magical thinking all too seductive, and without even casually examining his process, take seriously what should properly be viewed as a quirky amusement.

As a parting thought, you might like to read Dr Emoto’s Happiness Poem at Hado. Its innocent pining for a simple solution to everything that seems ‘wrong’ with the world (by ‘fixing our broken relationship with water…’) bespeaks a guileless mind that does not want to concern itself even slightly with the complexities of the way things actually are.

If only it was that easy.

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*It was kind of hard to tell. The makers of H²Om seemed to want to simultaneously align themselves with, and distance themselves from, Dr Emoto according to the usefulness of the context. A bet each way, it would appear.

†For a change, I really think that Dr Emoto is someone who genuinely does believe what he says, misguided though he may be. That puts him in a very obvious class of people, in my book – he’s just batty. He’s not as shifty and conniving as Jasmuheen, nor as smugly manipulative as Rael.

‡’Hado’, to rhyme with ‘shadow’ – apparently from two Japanese ideograms that mean wave and move.

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Remember Steorn, the Irish startup who claimed to have invented a machine for creating energy out of nothing? We examined their preposterous claims on The Cow almost two years ago, here, and then again, after they comprehensively failed to reveal their stunning breakthrough to the world, here.

I’ve checked in on them from time to time, but aside from the very occasional appearance with famous personages*, there’s been absolutely no action on the Steorn Free Energy front.

Until this week.

Given the deafening silence that resulted from Steorn’s attempt to convene a panel of experts to vindicate their claims, I was pretty sure that, like so many others throughout history who’ve vaunted perpetual motion machines, the company was dead and buried. Unfortunately I was mistaken. Like a zombie that’s been struck so many times with a shovel that its spinal cord is hanging out, Steorn has staggered from the Graveyard of Improbable Claims to walk among the rational once more. Actually, they’re more like vampires come to think of it – they’ve risen freshly reconstituted, with a website makeover, and a coven of new faces, to feed again on the blood of the gullible. But the unpleasant smell of decay still lingers under the paint job.

But enough of the colourful Hammer Horror metaphors. Surely Steorn wouldn’t be brazen enough to come back with the same old crap. Surely by now they’ve got something to substantiate their preposterous claims. Well let’s see…. there’s a graph…

…and a plastic doo-dah…

And they’re even selling a USB Hall Probe† (at 250 quid it’s a steal – yep, that’s right – them stealing from you). But aside from that, it’s all the same crapola. They’ve made a video that features a trio of luminaries extolling the virtues of Orbo (Steorn’s supposed free energy ‘engine’) without really saying anything more profound than ‘Gee whiz! Ah woonta believed it unless I sawr’n it with me own eyes!’. Unsurprisingly (to me at least) none of these boffins turns up on the first five pages of a ProprietarySearchEngine™ search. C’mon Steorn! If you’re going about spruiking your new Solution to the World’s Problems™, get some people with credibility to wave your flag! That is, of course, unless you can’t…

What else have we got… oh yeah! There’s an explanation of how Orbo works! Hang on now:

Orbo is based upon time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.

It is this variation of energy exchanged as a function of transaction time frame that lies at the heart of Orbo technology, and its ability to contravene the principle of the conservation of energy. Why? Conservation of energy requires that the total energy exchanged using interactions are invariant in time. This principle of time invariance is enshrined in Noether’s Theorem.

Aha! [Slaps hand on forehead] So obvious! In other words, what you’re saying is:

‘Crap crap crap crapola, crappity crap, big words, confusing technical jargon, more crap and then some crap.’

It all seems so simple in retrospect! If only I had thought of using magnets to make things go round and round forever and generate electricity in the process! Oh wait… I DID! In third grade! And then one day (the next day, as I recall) I learned from my science teacher, Mr Smythe,‡ that science is not what you want to happen, but what actually happens, and I gave up my dream of becoming the Henry Ford of the Free Energy Age.

So. What’s the game with Steorn? Can they possibly be the stellar kinds of bozos that they seem? Or have they simply outsmarted everyone with a hi-tech shell game? They’re certainly getting plenty of publicity, and now they’re selling training courses, so I’m sure they’ll fleece enough idiots of their cash to keep annoying us for at least another couple of years.

But one thing Steorn ain’t EVER going to do, is make a machine that outputs more energy than is put into it. Ever. Come back in ten years and tell me I’m wrong Steorn. Twenty, then. What the heck, I’ll give you a hundred!

Now, back to my workshop. The antigravity machine is a-l-m-o-s-t finished…

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*The woman in the middle of the photo is Mary McAleese, the President of Ireland. Steorn’s CEO, Sean McCarthy, is the man with the smug grin standing to her left.

†It’s basically just a gadget for measuring magnetic field strength. Ho hum.

‡Very curiously, Mr Smythe was a Christian. It was from this point that I understood that even very intelligent people could be hoodwinked, if they weren’t brave enough.

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On the Hume Highway north of Melbourne. A surprising number of people fail to take the turn.

While we’re on the subject of those with a very tenuous grasp on reality, let me introduce to you the latest invention to hit teh internets: the Magical Technical Remote Viewing Pen from from TRV University.™ Here’s what TRVU promises on their site:

Now you can convert ANY rollerball style pen to operate like a Magic Pen capable of downloading precise and accurate information about the future, the past or anything you want to know — anywhere on the planet.

Well tie me to an anthill and smear my ears with jam! Precise and accurate information at the same time! About anything I want to know, from anywhere or anywhen! Golly TRVU, how the heck does it work??!!

It’s a mind technology called Technical Remote Viewing and anyone can learn this formally top secret skill and for less than a dollar convert an ordinary pen into a magic pen worth millions.

A formally top secret skill! Well, that’s the bomb – who’d want an informal top secret skill?!* So, let me get this straight – I can convert an ordinary pen into a million dollar pen for less than a buck? Sweet! My fortune is made!

Sigh.

Digging through the trash heap that is the TRV Empire unearths several dumpster-loads of similar preposterous idiocy. On TRV ‘News’, for instance, we learn that if you fork out to attend TRV University ‘…you will be trained along with the best and brightest minds on the planet’ (a contention I find highly unlikely) to use your Magic Pen to be able to ‘accurately sketch a nuclear weapon located inside a mountain in China, thousands of miles away’ and ‘probe the mind of Osama bin Laden in real time, uncovering his current intent and next move’. Straight away one can quite clearly see that there are only two options here:

1: There are people out there with a Magic Pen who know where Osama bin Laden is and what he is thinking, but just don’t aim to tell anyone… or…

2: The pen doesn’t work.

It doesn’t require one of the brightest minds on the planet to figure out which of those alternatives is the most likely. This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amount of claptrap available at TRVU, though. Dane Spotts† from TRV News, a person who claims to be ‘properly trained’ in the use of the Magic Pen, sets us up for a demonstration of how effective the predictions are by choosing as a ‘target’ “The Next Catastrophic Terrorist Attack on US Soil”. But don’t hold your breath for any revelation of something that surely would benefit every single soul in the US‡ – Dane waffles on with some of the most ridiculous baloney for several pages without offering up a single whiff of a result, until, predictably he ends in a promise of ‘all will be revealed when you send us your money’.

Perhaps best of all are the ‘explanatory’ videos hosted by TRV spokeswoman Joni Dourif in which Ms Dourif makes some of the most risible and possibly actionable claims I’ve ever heard.

Here are a couple of the howlers she comes up with:

‘Having the Technical Remote Viewing Certification guarantees you a certain level of credibility amongst… uh… the law enforcements, amongst science and technology – who already know about us by the way’

Uh-huh. I think I know what that ‘certain level’ of credibility is likely to be. And, oh yes, I just bet the law enforcements know about you lot…

There is just an endless variety of options available for you to use this in a career. In science and technology, for example. You don’t need to be a doctor to assist a neurosurgeon…

There are neurosurgeons who consult Remote Viewers? OMFG! Kill me before I get to the operating theatre!

The TRVU site features several videos of Ms Dourif earnestly spouting such ridiculous and worrying nonsense. They are laugh-out-loud funny in places, and in others, stick-your-head-in-the-oven depressing. I am surprised that she can keep a straight face throughout, and I wonder if the many jump-cuts and fades are due to her corpsing her lines.

So how does the Magic Pen really work? Let’s go back to Dane Spotts’ ‘terrorist attack’ demonstration that I mentioned above. After Spotty leads us through some incomprehensible gibberish involving writing down random numbers and ‘prompting the signal line’, we have spent about 45 minutes doodling over a blank stack of Reflex and:

… have produced 30 or more sheets of paper which are covered in words, phrases and drawings, that we can now summarize and create an analysis from. It’s uncanny to see it all come together like some incredible jig saw puzzle; each piece combined to create a complete picture that reveals a solution to our problem. All of this from the tip of a magic pen.

In other words, TRVU is going to show you how to draw some vague predictions out of THIRTY PAGES of random scribbling! The obvious get-out-of-jail-free card here is that the Magic Pen has given you all the right information – if you don’t end up with an accurate prediction of the future it’s not the pen’s fault, it’s that you are a crap Remote Viewer!

As I read further and further through the TRVU sites, I find it harder and harder to convince myself that it’s not all some big joke. So much of it is SO farcical that I really want to believe it’s a giant leg pull. Sadly, it appears not to be the case – TRVU is an actual money-making venture; another shameless scam aimed at lining the pockets of morally bankrupt con-artists by fleecing gullible schmucks.

And I don’t for a moment think that the proprietors of TRVU really believe this rubbish. If there was anything at all to this ‘Remote Viewing’ it seems to be it would be the simplest thing in the world to verify. In fact, here you go, TRVU (or any other Remote Viewing adept) – I offer you up a challenge. I have, sitting on a chest of drawers in my bedroom, a box. Tell me what is in that box. Now I don’t mean thirty pages of guesses – I want an exact description of the contents of the box. You can do it in one short sentence. There should be no equivocating – it’s a very simple answer. This should be a completely trivial task for a graduate of TRVU, and here, in a public forum, you can demonstrate for all the world to see how marvellous your Magic Pen really is.

If you get it right, I promise I’ll buy out your entire stock.

(I will reveal the contents of the box here on The Cow in, oh, say two month’s time…)

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*I figure there’s a sure-fire way to spot pseudoscience even if you don’t know your pendulum from your psychomanteum – just look for the atrocious murdering of the English language in any promotional material. Dead giveaway.

†If you think his name sounds like a joke, you really should read his writing…

‡We must assume that Dane, a self-professed accomplished user of the Pen, actually does know this information but has declined to share it with anyone, for reasons I’d really like to hear.

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Ah, I just love it when the loonies leave their pearls of wisdom on The Cow. You may remember that some time back as part of our TCA Educational Series ‘Woowoo Beliefs’, we featured a little piece about a personage named Jasmuheen (Queen of the Breatharians). To recap, Jasmuheen claims that she does not need food and water to survive, but lives solely on air. It doesn’t require much intellectual effort to recognize this as an unmitigated barrel of hogwash.

Well, Cow Commenter Tibet23* is evidently not able/unwilling to expend said intellectual effort and has this to say:

The fact that you’ve not experienced anything else than your mcdonald-hungry body, does not exclude that people may be and behave differently.

Tibetan monks have been tested under controlled conditions…and scientist could not explain what they found.

Slowing down their heartbeats to almost stop. Being in a sleeplike state for days with no water no food, melting the snow around them while in meditation.

Is it a miracle? Are Tibetans special and we, poor mortals, can’t make it ?

Man is a machine. Somebody learn how it works and modify it. Others just use it to go to work…

Maybe we’re just scared by what we ignore.

Our intrepid correspondent T23, gives us the most wonderful metaphorical illustration of someone getting their head stuck in the banisters of logic. Significantly, notice how T23 is using science to bolster his/her argument whilst simultaneously treating it with disdain. In other words, T23 is holding up scientists as a benchmark for something that they claim is inherently unquantifiable by science.

Let’s just ignore the fact that the claim is in fact complete hogwash anyway – Tibetan monks don’t do anything that science can’t explain.† And, focally, with Jasmuheen we are not talking about a meditative state of low metabolism whilst sitting still doing nothing (which can quite easily be understood by science), but instead about her assertion that she doesn’t eat or drink anything at all and is somehow able to live a functional life. Actually, not just a functional life, but a better life than anyone else! This, as anyone with half a brain instantly recognizes, is complete rubbish.

Indeed, T23, I completely agree with you that the human body is a machine. And, just like your car, it needs fuel. But no matter how much you tinker with your Datsun, you’ll never get it running exclusively on fresh air. Just pointing at it sitting in the garage doing nothing is not proof of your wacky theory.

And if, by ‘maybe we’re just scared by what we ignore’ you mean maybe we’re scared by ignorance, well, then, yes, it certainly scares me. And, sadly, I doubt you’ll comprehend the true despondency I feel when I read comments like yours.

Now, where did I put my cheeseburger?

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*23! Sometimes I wonder if the Universe is just one big practical joke.

†OK, there is some neuroscience that is on the far edge of explanation, but then that is the case with a lot of neuroscience. Scientists freely admit that they don’t understand a lot of what the brain does. Scientists are really good at pointing out things they don’t understand. This is not, however, a free ticket to an endorsement of your wacky belief, no matter how much you’d like that.

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